Borderline by Marie-Sissi Labrèche : translation

This thesis consists of the French-to-English literary translation of an autofictional novel titled Borderline, by Marie-Sissi Labrèche. Borderline, first published in French by les Éditions du Boréal in 2000, is divided into nine chapters, as well as a prologue and an epilogue. The novel’s prologue sets the story’s tone. The narrator, Sissi Labrèche, says her grandmother’s always “talked crap,” and that her lurid threats taught her to fear the world from an early age. Sissi’s grandmother, Mémé, whose very specific brand of tales—tales that lean heavily into sexual trauma—suggest she’d experienced her own share of traumas, and that, in seeking to prepare or spare her vulnerable and volatile grand-daughter from the world’s ills by minutely detailing every abominable thing that might happen to her, instead transmits her own trauma to her grand-daughter, and exposes her young imagination to a grotesque and gritty shadow world of sorts, a kind of reality television meets horror show. The novel’s chapters flip back and forth through time from Sissi’s early childhood to her early adulthood, tracing clear psychological lines of cause and effect from childhood traumas to their echoes later in adulthood. Those chapters devoted to Sissi’s childhood delve into her experience growing up in Montreal’s lower-class neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve with her mother (Môman) who suffers from schizophrenia, and her grandmother, the family matriarch, who struggles to keep them all together. Whether set in the distant or the less distant past, Borderline explores the narrator’s experience living in poverty, and details her experiences with her own and with her family’s mental health issues, ranging from encounters with social services, psychiatric wards, a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, and suicidal ideation. Borderline, a gripping story recounted in a voice that is both raw and lyrical, is a novel that has helped set the tone for contemporary women’s writing in Quebec, laying the groundwork for an œuvre of bold, unparalleled autofictional work that has been emerging from Quebec since the Quiet Revolution.Arts, Faculty ofGraduat